Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

526 Jean Piaget
NOTES
I. See N. CHOMSKY, Cartesian Linguistics.
2. See the ‘Introduction’, 6, IV.
3. It is worth mentioning, though, that F. de Saussure took inspiration from economic
doctrines of equilibrium when founding his synchronic structuralism. But he
might just as easily have based his distinctions on that between organ and function
in biology.
4. For instance, Schmalhausen.
5. In this connexion cf. J. F. BERGIER and L. SOLARI, Pour une mdthodologie des scien-
ces dconomiques, Geneva, Librairie de l’Universit8, 1965, p. 15, where J. F. Bergier
refers to ‘a verification of the mechanisms of price formation insofar as these are
timeless and imperative’, an opinion on which Chapter IV shows that economists
are not always in agreement.
6. On the contrary, it is clear that different degrees and types of balancing or controls
giving a direction must be distinguished. Soviet authors, while emphasizing that
the mechanisms of retroaction are an indispensable attribute of the higher degrees
of organization of structures, maintain that ‘plan regulators’ are necessarily ac-
companied by ‘regulators of statistical structure’,, which are not identical with
them (see Y. A. LEVADA, ‘Knowledge and Direction in Social Processes’, Voprosy
jilosofii 5, 1956).
As for the problems of typology in general, they are studied closely in economics
and linguistics, less effectively in psychology and sociology. But it is doubtful whether
they could lead to interdisciplinary research at the present time (except in econom-
ics and sociology), for the ‘types’ differ considerably from one field to another.
7. For this comparison see J. PIAGET, Le structuralisme, Paris, P.u.P., 1968.
8. If the human subject or the social group were more than centres of functioning, if
they constituted a ‘structure of all the structures’ (which is impossible both because
of the known categorical antinomies and because of the theorems on the limits
of formalization), they would merge with the ‘transcendental subject’ of G priori
idealism.
9. This does not mean, as just stated, that consciousness is cause, since it remains
parallel to its physiological concomitants ; but it involves systems of meanings
mutually connected by implications, in isomorphism with the sequences of neu-
rological causality.
IO. B. PEKLOV, ‘Weber Norminferenzen’, Logique et Analyse 28, 1964, pp. 203-211.
11. 0. WEINBERGER, ‘Einige Betrachtungen iiber die Rechtnorm vom Standpunkt des
Logik und der Semantik‘, Logigue et Analyse 28, 1964, pp. 212-232.
12. It should be noted in particular that these trends of relational structuralism show
considerable similarity with those of research in epistemology and methodology in
the works of a certain number of Soviet authors (V. I. Kremyanski, Y. A. Levada,
G. P. Chtchedrovitski, V. N. Sadovski, V. A. Lektorski, E. G. Youdine, etc.).
13. True, one may wonder what the term ‘operation’ signifies in a social system. But
if we define an operation as an action which is capable of interiorisation, reversible
and related to other operations within an overall structure, it is clear that opera-
tions occur in all inter-individual actions which are not based solely on relations of
force or authority and in all collective actions where norms apply, in short wherever
a trace of rationality can be found in a social system (which is by no means excep-
tional).
14. When we say ‘translated in the consciousness’ this means that the causality involved
should not be sought within the consciousness but in the underlying structures of
which the subject’s consciousness knows only the results, which he translates into
terms of implications (see the end of section 3).
15. A ‘normative fact’is the establishment by the sociologist (in sociology of law, etc.)
of the fact that the subject recognises a norm as binding upon him; by establishing